Category: Wii

We just got a new Wii, because our current one is on its last legs. One of the Wiimotes is already dead and the system itself will often freeze, refuse to read discs, or have any number of other strange issues. I’ve gone so long without calling tech support because I’m kind of dreading having to describe the issue; there isn’t one simple issue to describe, it just often doesn’t work.

Damion Schubert posted the above question yesterday on his blog (Zen of Design). My answer appears to have been deleted, so I’ll write about it here. I linked to some posts on “Malstrom’s Articles” which I believed to be relevant. I should add that to the links at the right, by the way. I’ll do that as soon as I put this post up.

Shamus Young posted on Friday about how the Golden Age of Gaming was a few years ago, and on the same day there was an article by Sean Sands at The Escapist about how it is actually right now. So Shamus asked what makes right now so great.

I finally finished Assassin’s Creed a few days ago after not having played it for months, and I have to say I greatly enjoyed it. Genetic memories may not be good science, but who cares? It’s an alternate universe anyway–you have to suspend disbelief in exactly the same way for even wackier things in movies all the time. I really liked the story and I think the ending was perfect.

I’m having a lot of fun with the game. Last night I almost bought some of the extra stuff, even though I don’t think I’m far enough along in the game yet to take advantage of any of it. But in almost buying it, I looked more closely at the descriptions (in the game) of what the content packs contain.

Got Super Smash Bros. Brawl yesterday and have been having fun with it. The story mode is significantly longer than it was in Melee; in that one you could finish it in an hour or so, whereas I played a lot yesterday and am 1/3 of the way through the story in Brawl. I’m glad the story mode is 2-player, so my daughter can play that with me.

I am starting work on a video game version of Stardust (you may recall that Stardust is the working title of my board game side project—or you may not), using XNA Game Studio 2.0, which I hope to eventually make available on the Xbox 360 (through Xbox Live Arcade or the as-yet-unannounced XNA distribution mechanism, if it is suitable). XNA was chosen because I like the ease of programming in C# and it’s kind of cool to be able to make games that work on the 360 (functionality I have not yet tried, since I don’t plan on paying the $100 for a year of the Creators’ Club until I have something worth testing on the 360). This is the first time I’ve done any graphics programming (I haven’t even done a custom Windows forms control before), so the fact that XNA makes it a bit easier is another benefit. I’m doing the graphical stuff first because it is good motivation when I can literally see the progress I am making. So far it basically just draws the board.

Forgot to mention here the awesome deal I got at Toys ‘R Us last week. In the ad last week they were offering a $25 gift card for buying Super Mario Galaxy. I figured I would get it anyway but was intending to wait, until I saw that. My wife had also clipped a coupon for a $10 gift card with a $75 purchase. After looking through most of the store for something to push us over the $75 mark so we could take advantage of both offers, we went to the video games section and I mentioned that I had intended to get Zack & Wiki before too long anyway. So we picked that up and when we got to the counter the guy told us Wii games were buy 2, get one free. Sweet! So I also got Metroid Prime 3: Corruption–they were out of Fire Emblem and Super Paper Mario.

Well, after reading this, Call of Duty 4 has now been added to my Christmas list as well. There are so many good games coming out, it’s a little daunting and worrisome. When will I have the time to enjoy them all?

Raph Koster and Areae have just unveiled their big project, Metaplace. It sounds really exciting; I hope the targeted ads are not too obtrusive, and I very much hope that clients will be available for all the consoles and handhelds (PS3, 360, Wii, PSP, DS). I don’t really like playing games on the PC anymore, because mine sucks. If I could get to it from my Xbox 360, that would be so cool…